After the Freedmen's Bureau: Administering Freedom in the Age of Emancipation

FAIN: FT-264881-19

Dale Kretz
Texas Tech University (Lubbock, TX 79409-0006)

Research and writing leading to a book about the Freedmen’s Branch (1872-1878), established by Congress to handle applications for bounties, back pay, and pensions for former slaves and African-American soldiers.

My book project explores how formerly enslaved men and women maintained their wartime foothold in the U.S. federal government from the Civil War until the New Deal. While claiming military benefits in extraordinary numbers, freepeople negotiated issues of slavery, identity, loyalty, dependency, and disability, all within an increasingly complex and rapidly expanding federal administrative state.

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